The Chronicle of Higher Education
September 5, 2008 Friday
Academics in Georgia and U.S. Affected by War
by ANNA NEMTSOVA and KARIN FISCHER
Fighting between Georgia and Russia has affected higher education in
both Georgia and the United States.
Gori University, which sits just outside the disputed territory of
South Ossetia, was among the targets of Russian forces in August.
The university suffered two bombings in three days. One of its six
buildings was hit, windows were broken, and shrapnel ruined some
storage sheds. The campus was soon abandoned by its 110 professors and
2,000 students.
Ironically, the now partly ruined university had been seen as a rare
success story in the separatist dispute that sparked the war.
The institution represented the integration of Gori State University
and Tskhinvali University. The latter had been in the center of South
Ossetia, a breakaway province, but moved to Gori after a previous war
there in 1992.
Meanwhile at least a dozen American academics and students were
evacuated from the former Soviet republic.
One professor and three students from Case Western Reserve University,
who were planning to spend a month analyzing and mapping
archaeological sites near Tbilisi, were instead forced to leave the
country. They rented a van and drove to Turkey along with a colleague
from the University of Toronto.
Most of the other academics left Georgia as part of convoys to
neighboring Armenia organized by the U.S. government, which
recommended that all American citizens depart Georgia. Students from
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the American Councils for International
Education, a nonprofit group that runs overseas programs and
exchanges, were on the convoys.
The unrest has also stranded some Georgian students who were studying
or planning to study at American universities, preventing them from
traveling for the fall term or for new-student orientation, several
college officials said.
The University of Washington canceled a monthlong program on Georgian
culture and history that had been scheduled to begin in August.